PayPal

Sunday, May 31, 2015

One’s first inclination is to laugh – laugh heartily
or perhaps in despair – at the idea that college students, or students of any
kind, require “trigger warnings” that they will encounter “upsetting” material
in the books they are reading. I nearly laughed out loud when I read an
article, which is linked in a Daniel Greenfield book review of a title produced
by an especially repulsive writer, David K. Shipler. Greenfield wrote in “Shameless
Liar: The Strange Dishonest World of David K. Shipler”:

Freedom of Speech [Shipler’s book] instead sets out an imaginary struggle in which
the conservatives are censors while those on the left are defenders of free
speech. There are bad parents who think their children shouldn’t be assigned
novels filled with graphic sexual acts and good leftist teachers who teach
children that free enterprise is evil. It’s a comfortable lefty talking point
from a few generations ago.

Today books with sexual content are censored by social justice
warriors who demand trigger warnings or object to heteronormative content. The
final frontier for censoring novels isn’t the PTA; it’s angry
students at colleges demanding trigger warnings for The Great Gatsby and Lolita.

Trigger
warnings, which are common in blogs but also have begun to appear on college
and university syllabuses, are supposed to signal to readers that forthcoming
material may be uncomfortable or upsetting. Trigger warned-subject matter – in
literature, films or other texts – usually relates to sexual assault and other
kinds of violence, racism, and the like, and advocates say students have a
right to know of sensitive material in advance.

But
some critics of trigger warnings say that higher education is rooted in
confronting uncomfortable ideas and experiences. And more practically, critics
say, it’s nearly impossible in classes with students with differing
sensibilities to define what deserves a trigger warning.

How did Oberlin define a “trigger” or a “trigger
warning”?

“Triggers
are not only relevant to sexual misconduct, but also to anything that might
cause trauma,” the policy said. “Be aware of racism, classism, sexism,
heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.
Realize that all forms of violence are traumatic, and that your students have
lives before and outside your classroom, experiences you may not expect or
understand.” The policy said that “anything could be a trigger,” and advised
professors to “[r]emove triggering material when it does not contribute
directly to the course learning goals.”

Oberlin later “tabled the policy” because its
faculty complained it wasn’t consulted on its content and recommendations. After
all, how could they indoctrinate their students in the Marxist/Progressive
litany of capitalist crimes of “of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and
other issues of privilege and oppression” if they had to preface every mention
of Western “crimes” and “cultural imperialism” with a warning?

Given
the lack of consensus on trigger warnings in the classroom, it was perhaps
unsurprising that the extensive trigger warning policy Oberlin College
published in its Sexual Offense Resource Guide proved controversial earlier
this academic year. Faculty members criticized the policy from within, saying
it had been drafted largely without their input, even though they stood on the
front lines of such a policy….

“This
section of the resource guide is currently under revision, after thoughtful
discussion on campus suggested that some changes could make the guide more
useful for faculty,” Meredith Raimondo, associate dean of the College of Arts
and Sciences and co-chair of the Sexual Offense Policy Task Force, said via
email. “As the resource guide has always stated, the task force values both
academic freedom and support for survivors of sexualized violence. We do not
see these as contradictory projects, but rather that both are necessary to
create an appropriately challenging and effective learning environment.” Oberlin’s
sexual offense policy page for faculty contains a similar message under the
heading “How can I make my classroom more inclusive for survivors of
sexualized violence?”

The Higher Ed article reported that most of the
Oberlin faculty, which initially endorsed such a policy, realized that to
adhere to such a policy would render teaching anything virtually impossible. A
teacher would need the faculty of omniscience to know the “sensitivities” and “trauma”
potentialities of his students to pen such “trigger warnings” to his syllabus. Were
it the subject of study, the violence in The Old Testament of the Bible would
require ten or twenty dozen “trigger warnings,” as well as the seduction scenes
in Alfred HItchcock’s North by Northwest, in one of which Eva Marie Saint is being seduced by Cary
Grant, who says he might murder her, and she says, “Please
do.”

It would be enough to drive a gay or LGBT student
up the wall and cause it seek therapy, or seek some form of medicinal relief,
and plummet it to the deepest depths of depression to see heterosexuals
flaunting their cultural “privilege” and sexual hegemony so shamelessly.

Academia
has always been an easy target for mockery. Henry Kissinger observed that
university politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so low, and
one logical extension is that liberal arts departments are steeped in
self-importance precisely because their impact on the "real world" is
negligible.

Ergo,
the recent campus phenomenon known as the "trigger warning." Originating
on certain feminist, self-help and social activist blogs, trigger warnings are
meant to inform readers that the ensuing material deals with subjects, such as
war or sexual violence, that might upset those suffering from post-traumatic
stress related to those issues….

Now
the practice is creeping toward liberal arts syllabi. The UC Santa Barbara
student Senate recently passed a resolution calling for professors to label
potentially upsetting course material and even excuse "triggered"
students from some classes. Oberlin College in Ohio has already implemented
such guidelines, advising instructors not to assign triggering material at all
unless it's directly relevant to the lesson.

Distressing
as such potential incursions on academic freedom and inquiry may be, the real
trend here may not be trigger warnings but the torrent of outrage they've set
off. They're ripe for bemused chatter, to say the least. A New Republic article
supplied a list of warning-worthy triggers: bullying, sizism, ablism,
transphobia, slut shaming, alcohol and (seriously) animals in wigs. In
December, Slate declared 2013 "the year of the trigger warning." Even
the satirical Onion has been called out for failing to warn readers about
disturbing content in fake stories.

Yes, “trigger warnings” are eminently susceptible
to ribaldry and mockery, but the fact that such an issue even arises in the ivy
of politically correctness that currently chokes the halls of academe should
serve as a signal that students and teachers alike are thriving on the
nonsense.

I
have to admit, the first time I heard about trigger warnings, I thought they
were a joke. In short, trigger warnings assume that students are so infantile
that they cannot handle classroom discussion or themes in great literature that
push them beyond their comfort zone. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
(about whose work I previously blogged here),
discusses trigger warnings in Freedom
from Speech, his new Encounter Broadside booklet:

In May 2014, the New
York Timescalled attention to a new arrival on the college campus:
trigger warnings. Seemingly overnight, colleges and universities across America
have begun fielding student demands that their professors issue content
warnings before covering any material that might evoke a negative emotional
response…. By way of illustration, the Times
article pointed to a Rutgers’ student’s op-ed requesting trigger
warnings for The Great Gatsby,
which apparently “possesses a variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive
and misogynistic violence.”

Rubin later in his piece sends up trigger warnings
in a paragraph full of trigger warnings, ending with:

Trigger
warnings, even if well intentioned, might remind them of this oppressive and
sometimes lethal political correctness and cause undue stress. Accordingly, in
order to protect the mental well-being of those who value liberty, intellectual
freedom, and oppose censorship, perhaps it’s time to agree to put trigger
warnings ahead of trigger warnings to ensure that no one is inadvertently
stressed out by the decline in mental and intellectual maturity and the
infantilization of society which trigger warnings represent.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP))
reported in August 2014 in “On Trigger Warnings”:

A
current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that
teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything
that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students. This
follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities by introducing
material that challenges their values and beliefs….

As
one report noted, at Wellesley College students objected to "a sculpture
of a man in his underwear because it might be a source of 'triggering thoughts
regarding sexual assault.' While the [students’] petition acknowledged that the
sculpture might not disturb everyone on campus, it insisted that we share a
'responsibility to pay attention to and attempt to answer the needs of all of
our community members.' Even after the artist explained that the figure was
supposed to be sleepwalking, students continued to insist it be moved
indoors."

The
presumption that students need to be protected rather than challenged in a
classroom is at once infantilizing and anti-intellectual. It makes
comfort a higher priority than intellectual engagement and—as the Oberlin list
demonstrates—it singles out politically controversial topics like sex, race,
class, capitalism, and colonialism for attention.

Colleges
across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for
what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they
are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students
assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or
in war veterans. The warnings, which have their ideological roots in feminist
thought, have gained the most traction at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where the student government formally called for them.
But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University of
Michigan, George Washington University and other
schools....

The
most vociferous criticism has focused on trigger warnings for materials that
have an established place on syllabuses across the country. Among the
suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are
Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia
Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide)….

“Frankly
it seems this is sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly
expecting physical comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg
Lukianoff, president of the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that advocates free
speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach people that there is a real
important and serious value to being offended. Part of that is talking about
deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”

The New Republic also weighed in on the subject here,
making many of the same points about “shielding students’ psyches” from “uncomfortable”
or “traumatizing” literary and even cinematic content in the classroom and in
readings.

I wonder how many “trigger warnings” would be
required for students reading Ayn Rand’s The
Fountainhead that there is a rape
scene in the novel (which Rand called “rape
by engraved invitation”). On the side of the sexual assault coin is the
rampage of rapes by ISIS on Yazidis and other non-Muslim women. But then, in
today’s universities, Rand’s novels are not studied, and criticizing Islam is
out of the question, as well.

My own hypothesis about the newly ubiquitous
phenomena of “trigger warnings” is that that they are a direct result of the
McDonald’s “hot coffee” lawsuit and similar lawsuits that followed it. That
lawsuit resulted a huge “compensatory” award to the “victim” of scalding hot
coffee. The LectLaw site
has some interesting information on the case:

Stella
Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was in the passenger seat of her grandson's
car when she was severely burned by McDonalds' coffee in February 1992.
Liebeck, 79 at the time, ordered coffee that was served in a Styrofoam cup at
the drive-through window of a local McDonalds.

After
receiving the order, the grandson pulled his car forward and stopped
momentarily so that Liebeck could add cream and sugar to her coffee. (Critics
of civil justice, who have pounced on this case, often charge that Liebeck was
driving the car or that the vehicle was in motion when she spilled the coffee;
neither is true.) Liebeck placed the cup between her knees and attempted to
remove the plastic lid from the cup. As she removed the lid, the entire
contents of the cup spilled into her lap. The sweatpants Liebeck was wearing
absorbed the coffee and held it next to her skin. A vascular surgeon determined
that Liebeck suffered full thickness burns (or third-degree burns) over 6
percent of her body, including her inner thighs, perineum, buttocks, and
genital and groin areas.

So, instead of setting the Styrofoam cup on her arm
rest, or on the dashboard, or opening the glove compartment in front of her and
placing the cup on the swing-open door to add her cream and sugar, she placed
it between her knees. Naturally, this would require a bit of a squeeze by her
knees to keep the cup steady, even were the car not moving. Naturally, the
liquid would exert pressure on the plastic lid. A sudden jolt would result in a caffeine
eruption from the cup. Duh! This is carelessness with a capital C.

And there’s your problem with product liability
suits and “consumer” protection laws and warning labels on especially food
packaging: It’s all devised to appeal to people who are habitually or congenitally
non-thinkers, to stay the hands of the stupid, to deter the actions of the
dense, and for companies to protect or insulate themselves from ruinous
lawsuits by the thoughtless and their
conniving lawyers.

There are now countless “trigger warnings” on food
packaging, such as, “Caution: Product will be hot!” and “Lift lid carefully. It’s
hot!” especially on microwavable snacks and entrées. Which is in the way of
obviating the whole purpose of heating the meal in the first place. Such warnings
seem addressed to anyone with a short-term memory who has forgotten the nature
of heat. These are in addition to the superfluous
advisories to wait one or five minutes for the “product to complete cooking”
after a microwaving, when it will sit in a microwave oven daring you to reach
inside and touch the product before it cools to a presumably scientifically
measured temperature and to a minimal point of tactile tolerance. Otherwise,
you would presumably cook your fingers.

I must confess that I’ve squeezed a Styrofoam cup
more than once and saw the liquid spill onto my Chicken McNuggets (but never
into my lap). I’ve also been so drowsy in the morning that I’ve tried to brush
my teeth with shaving cream and lather my face with toothpaste. I blame
Barbasol and Crest for not providing me with “trigger warnings.” Those episodes
of semi-consciousness cost me irreparable mental anguish.

I’m sure there are countless lovers of Marie
Callender’s chicken pot pies who, without the trigger

warning that’s not only on the packaging, but on
the pie wrapping itself, would thoughtlessly reach with their bare fingers into
a steaming, freshly nuked pie and blame Marie Callender for their pains.

Perhaps
drawings
of Mohammad should come with “trigger warnings” for Muslims. “Caution!
Visual contact with this picture may offend and traumatize you and make you so unconformable
that you may become homicidal!” But, do Muslims really need “trigger fingers”
for anything?

Thursday, May 28, 2015

“Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death.
Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the
essential crime that contains all others unto itself.” Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four*

The
problems with this should be obvious, and it’s a sign of the fix we’re in that
they aren’t. Who decides what speech is “intended to stir up hatred against a
particular group”? Islamic supremacist groups such as Hamas-linked CAIR and
other “Islamophobia”-mongers relentlessly claim that foes of jihad terror and
Sharia supremacism are stirring up hatred against Muslims. This charge is
entirely baseless, as any Muslim who sincerely rejects jihad terror and the
imposition of Sharia in the West should be standing with us, and is welcome to
do so.

But
the key question here is, who decides?
The allies and friends of those who believe, or claim to believe, that it is
“inciting hatred” to oppose jihad terror and Sharia supremacism are in the
corridors of power. If the Democrats succeed in criminalizing “hate speech,”
there is no doubt that it will become illegal to speak honestly about the
nature and magnitude of the jihad threat, and the jihadis will be able to
advance unimpeded. [Italics mine]

Since
1994 people convicted
of federal crimes motivated by the 'actual or perceived' identity of victims
have faced tougher sentences. Many other states had passed 'hate crime'
statutes in earlier years, and in recent years many states have been adopting
laws which make crimes motivated by the victim's sexual orientation of gender
identity hate crimes which face tougher sentences, something the federal
government did in 2009. Unlike much of the rest of the developed world,
however, the United States does not make it a criminal offense for people to
make statements which encourage hatred of particular groups. For example a
prominent British columnist, Katie Hopkins, is being investigated by the police
for referring to African
migrants crossing the Mediterranean as 'cockroaches'.

YouGov's
latest research shows that many Americans support making it a criminal offense
to make public statements which would stir up hatred against particular groups
of people. Americans narrowly support (41%) rather than oppose (37%)
criminalizing hate speech, but this conceals a partisan divide. Most Democrats
(51%) support criminalizing hate speech, with only 26% opposed. Independents
(41% to 35%) and Republicans (47% to 37%) tend to oppose making it illegal to
stir up hatred against particular groups….

When
it comes to crimes motivated by hatred, most Americans do back the current
federal hate crime laws, including the expanded definition of hate crime passed
in 2009. 56% of Americans back the federal law mandating tougher penalties for
cimes motivated by race, religion or gender, and 51% support expanding that to
include sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. Democrats (68%)
tend to be much more supportive of the law than either independents and
Republicans. Republicans (38% to 39%) are split over the expanded definition of
hate crime, while independent tend to support (46%) rather than oppose (28%)
it.

And one of the questions in the survey was whether respondents
supported or opposed “the federal law which expands existing federal hate crime
law to apply to crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender,
sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability?”

Although the survey results are interesting, the
percentages are irrelevant. I subscribe to the “Fifty million Frenchmen can be
as wrong as one” school of deciding whether or notsomething is right, or whether or notsomething exists, or whether or notsomething ought to be. That is, I do not make
value judgments or act on a consensus. I base my decisions and conclusions on
the evidence of my own senses, and not on the collective opinion of countless,
anonymous others.

According
to Wikipedia,
“The modern era of hate-crime legislation began in 1968 with the
passage of federal statute, 18 U.S. 245, part of the Civil Rights Act which made it illegal to
"by force or by threat of force, injure, intimidate, or interfere with
anyone who is engaged in six specified protected activities, by reason of their
race, color, religion, or national
origin." However, "The prosecution of such crimes must be
certified by the U.S. attorney general."

Originally
introduced by Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) as
freestanding legislation, the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act was
enacted into law as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act
of 1994. Pursuant to the Act, the United States Sentencing Commission
established a sentencing enhancement of "not less than 3 offense levels
for [federal] offenses that the finder of fact at trial determines beyond a
reasonable doubt are hate crimes." The enhancement defines a hate crime as
"a crime in which the defendant intentionally selects a victim, or in the
case of a property crime, the property that is the object of the crime, because
of the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity,
gender, disability, or sexual orientation of any person." In other words, sentences imposed on
defendants convicted of federal crimes may be substantially increased if the
crime is found to be motivated by bias. This measure--which covers only
federal crimes--applies, for example, to bias-motivated attacks and vandalism
that occur in national parks and on other Federal property. This enhancement
took effect on November 1, 1995. [Italics
mine]

The notion of hate
crimes has been troublesome for me ever since it was introduced. I couple
it with the phenomenon of hate speech.
The two notions are intimately – nay, intrinsically
linked. For if one thinks a politically incorrect or criminalized thought, the
assumption is that one will likely act on it. Ergo, the speech police must
discourage, frustrate, and even censor speech before it could possibly entice
the speaker to commit a violent crime. And if a hate crime is committed, then
the penalty for it must be made more severe than if one committed the crime for
banal reasons (e.g., committing a murder in the course of another felony, or
just holding up a bank or a convenience store for “mere” money).

Linked in the USGOV story was an International
Business Times story about Katie Hopkins, a British writer who
characterized in her Sun newspaper column the hundreds of “migrants” from North
Africa crossing the Mediterranean in boats to Italy and Europe as
“cockroaches.” The Have
a LIttle Faith site provided a more extensive quotation from the Sun
article:

Katie
wrote in the Sun newspaper that instead of rescue boats helping migrants, there
should in fact be gun ships. She refers to migrants as “a plague of feral
humans” and likened them to cockroaches. She suggests we take the “Australian
approach” of “threaten[ing] them with violence until they bugger off, throwing
cans of Castlemaine in an Aussie version of Sharia stoning,” a statement which
manages to be offensive to Australians, Muslims and migrants all in one.

Of course, liberal/left blog sites like The
Huffington Post climbed on board the let’s-get-Hopkins fried-and-fired
train. Regardless, however, of what one thinks of her remarks, should Hopkins
be punished for speaking her mind? Is it the Sun newspaper’s option or is it
“society’s” to determine her career status? Suppose I called all the illegal
immigrants pouring into the U.S. from Mexico “cockroaches”? Or, better yet, “termites”
meant to undermine the country and to solidify the Democratic voting bloc in
this country for decades to come, as Obama intended all along? Should we gag Ann
Coulter for alleging that one of the purposes of the border invasion is to
achieve the “browning” of America, and force her to perform “community” service
in an orange jump suit? Should the government shut down Rule of Reason for
printing my “provocative” speech, or threaten other sites to refrain from
reprinting my remarks on pain of financial or other penalties? For a detailed
exchange between Coulter and her inadequate Fusion host, go to Salon here,
or read her Point column about the Fusion interview here.

The Orwell quotation that opens this column is
pertinent. The key part of it is the
essential crime that contains all others unto itself. Wikipedia lists other
terms that occur in Orwell’s dystopian novel.

“Crimestop means to rid oneself of
unwanted thoughts, i.e., thoughts that interfere with the ideology of the
Party. This way, a person avoids committing thoughtcrime….
Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at
the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping
analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the
simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or
repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical
direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

A voluntarily self-imposed protective stupidity, to be
more precise. To dwell on unorthodox thoughts is crimethink. At the moment, Muslims seem to be the only observable
group, aside from the MSM, to follow a regime of crimethink and presumably engage in crimestop. They do not question the basic, fundamental tenets of
Islam, do acknowledge that some of what its adherents do is really awful, but
stop short of blaming Islam itself. They don’t wish to commit hate speech. They
do not wish to risk the charge of blasphemy. They do not wish to question the
politically correct orthodoxy that Islam has been “hijacked” by monsters. They
not wish to suggest, let alone say it explicitly, that Islam by its nature
inculcates monsters and that monsters are all we can expect from Islam.

Imagine having a serious discussion with Joe Biden
about Aristotelian philosophy. No? With Shirley Jackson Lee of Texas? I can
hear the raspberries.

Or with Barack Obama on the golf course. “All I
know is,” he’d say, “is that when I hit the ball, it goes somewhere. Not always
where I want it to go. That’s metaphysics for you. Unreliable. Usually it’s in
complete conflict with my epistemological expectations and desires.”

Want to call that “hate speech”? Go right ahead.
It’s called satire. And I haven’t seen a flattering political cartoon of Obama
in, well, years. Why aren’t those cartoonists in jail for having provoked
enmity towards Obama? They’ve done violence to his reputation and credibility.
Of reputation, he has carloads; of credibility, it amounts to a rusted Chevy
sitting on cinder blocks in the Arkansas hinterland.

Back to the
essential crime that contains all others unto itself. Imagine that I shot a
rabbi, or a priest, or even an imam. Why would I shoot a cleric? Is it relevant
why? Perhaps I found the cleric’s
garb “provocative.” Perhaps he flipped me off some time in the past. Perhaps he
shouted at me in front of witnesses that I was as thick as a brick. Anyway, the
sight of him was personally offensive. But the motive, if objective law was
adhered to, would be irrelevant. I committed a capital crime: first degree
murder, aggravated assault, premeditated murder, whatever. Before the
introduction of exception-making in criminal jurisprudence to protect specific
groups, the physical crime was all that I would be tried and convicted for. I initiated
force against another man. I murdered or wounded him. That’s the crime, and
that’s all that would be to it.

My motive would not
have been criminalized. My animus for clerics and my thinking about shooting
the cleric would not have been
criminalized. The contents of my mind would not
have been the subject of criminal legislation. My motive likely would have been
used by the prosecution and defense to explain
why I shot the cleric, but my motive would not
have been on trial. Just my provable, demonstrable actions. Atheistic or anti-cleric
or Islamophobic literature might have been found by the police in my home, on
my computer, or buried in the back yard – or there might have been no such
literature at all to find.

Let’s change the scenario a wrinkle. Suppose I was
a Muslim and I was offended by visual representations of Mohammad, or I was
told by my American mullah or imam that I ought to be offended. I go to the
magazine that’s published some really “provocatively” offensive images of
Mohammad and shoot the staff. Or I go to Garland, Texas, and try to shoot
everyone attending a conference held to celebrate the drawing of Mohammad. All
those people deserved to die, I think, they were out to get my goat. Or my ewe.
They were exploiting the phobia Americans
have about Islam. About me.

Knowing that depictions of Mohammad are forbidden
in Islam by the faithful and by the
unbelievers wherever they live, they deliberately set out to provoke me! Taunt me! Dare me! I’m
shot and wounded by a single policeman before I can do anything. The press and
TV reporters learn I’m a Muslim. Possibly deranged, possibly not. A little
strain of sympathy is felt for me. I couldn’t
help but react the way I did. My religion was being mocked! My icon of a
perfect man was being denigrated and slandered! Overwhelming hostility is felt
for Pamela Geller and everyone having anything to do with scheduling and holding
and participating in the Draw Mohammad conference. Geller and her fellow provocateurs
ought to have known what the
consequences would be. I would show up, or someone else. That’s what everyone
would be saying. Wave a red cape at a bull and the bull’s going to charge. Don’t
wave the red cape, and the bull will lie down beneath the press box to bask in
the sun and dream of Pamplona.

Or of enlisting in ISIS.

Didn’t these freedom-of-speech fanatics know that? But they did know it! They boast of it! They were not practicing responsible free speech. They consciously
set out to provoke me! I didn’t have to look at the drawings, no one forced me
to. But I’m a product of my Islamic environment, and I can't help but look and
be offended. I have no volitional consciousness. How do I know they
deliberately provoked me? I just know it. I can’t help it if they choose to incite hatred against me and my faith!

The press and TV anchors, politicians, Donald Trump
and Bill O’Reilly don’t much examine my
motives. But they put Geller’s motives through the wringer. They also insinuated
that the Charlie Hebdo staff had it coming to them. They further insinuate that
had I not forgotten to thumb off the safety on my gun, Geller and Bosch Fawstin
and Robert Spencer would have had it coming to them, too.

Spencer reported that a gaggle of Democrats are all
for passing laws that would restrict
freedom of speech, to make it more “responsible.” Of course, as a
consequence, speech would no longer be “free,” but regulated. Which would mean that thought would be regulated. If you have a thought, and must express
it in a way deemed acceptable and proper according to some authority’s
criteria, and there are penalties for not meeting those criteria, how free can
thinking be, either? Before you set hand to keyboard or brush to an easel, you
must indulge in crimestop before you
commit crimethink, or “hate speech”
or a hate crime. You must vet
yourself before letting the speech police can vet your speech.

Which can easily lead to thoughtcrime.

It would be wrong to call this petit totalitarianism. It is totalitarianism pure and simple.

….A
police state is less about enforcement than control. Its function is to make a
ruling class irresistible when robbing and oppressing, or when imposing its
utopian fantasies. If people can be made to obey without being clubbed to death
in a police cell, why bother with violence? There is no British Gestapo or KGB
or Stasi, because our own police state rests on a foundation of changes of
investigatory and criminal procedure and of omnipresent surveillance. When
people know that they are being watched in all that they do, and when they know
that stepping over some invisible line will put them to great inconvenience and
expense, they will change their behavior and their attitudes to authority.

But, back to my enraged and offended Muslim scenario
and my fumbled attempt to impose Sharia Law on Geller and her provocateurs. I’m
finally put on trial for an attempted act of terrorism. I’m convicted of
attempted murder and nothing else. My defense counsel protests and I protest:
But…but what about my religion? What about my motive? This isn’t fair! You’re just sentencing me for carrying a
gun with the intent to kill some people! Sure, I was about to commit a hate crime, but that should be in my
favor, because I’m a persecuted minority! And oppressed. And anti-Islamophobia!
This is more evidence of my oppression, judging me by my mere actions, and not
by my motives! Geller and her provocateurs are guilty of a hate crime, too!
They entrapped me!

Let’s turn that around. It is but a few tentative,
mincing steps from treating a physical, demonstrable crime and bundling it with
one’s motive or the contents of one’s mind and packaging it as a whole. Which is
what is being done today.

Blaming Pamela Gelleret al.
for the violence in Garland, Texas, and deeming the Draw Mohammad contest and
event a deliberate “provocation,” and illegal and a crime, is what the government
and the MSM are coyly, if not vociferously, sidling up to, a British- or
European-style power to fetter and regulate freedom of speech – a.k.a., censorship.

Edward Cline, American Novelist

Edward Cline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1946. After graduating from high school (in which he learned nothing of value) and a stint in the Air Force, he pursued his ambition to become a novelist. His first detective novel, First Prize, was published in 1988 by Mysterious Press/Warner Books, and his first suspense novel, Whisper the Guns, was published in 1992 by The Atlantean Press. First Prize was republished in 2009 by Perfect Crime. The Sparrowhawk series of novels set in England and Virginia in the pre-Revolutionary period has garnered critical acclaim (but not yet from the literary establishment) and universal appreciation from the reading public, including parents, teachers, students, scholars, and adult readers who believe that American history has been abandoned or is misrepresented by a government-dominated educational establishment. He is dedicated to Objectivism, Ayn Rand's philosophy of reason in all matters.